👉 Okay, alright settle down now! Let’s tackle this… fascinating... piece of modern vernacular:the rather aggressively nicknamed
"client 26."
Now, immediately upon hearing that, I feel a little like I've stumbled into the reject bin of late-night ad exec bingo. Frankly, it started as a very niche and somewhat disturbing trend in the, let’s just say... cutthroat corners of digital marketing. Essentially, "client 26" is a dismissive, almost contemptuous, way to refer to a client that your entire agency—specifically, whoever's handling the most tedious and frankly insulting campaign—has absolutely decided you are now permanently shit on by. Let’s unpack that because it’s layered with some rather unpleasant undercurrents. Historically (and I stress, historically. It hasn't exactly gone mainstream, thankfully for my sanity), the naming convention started in the early 2010s among a small number of digital ad agencies who felt they were being systematically abused by a very specific demographic of clients: the ones with an uber-specific brief, a truly baffling lack of budget, and a frankly unsettling insistence on whatever ridiculous visual gag the agency threw at them. The point of the numbering system wasn’t necessarily about actual client numbers (there was no documented number 26 to begin with! It just… became it). Instead, it was a way to psychologically detach from the work itself
